What is the most important thing I’ve learned?

The importance of focus.

And yet, most people don’t understand ‘focus’, even if they think they do.

The unlock is seeing how focus applies to everything:

I’ll start by stepping through focus as a tool for personal success and how I relate to focus as a life strategy, day-by-day strategy, and minute-by-minute strategy.

I’ll then move to the implications of focus for company strategy, go-to-market, branding & positioning, and team management.

I’ll round up with tips and tools for focus.

Focus as a life strategy

When Bill Gates first met Warren Buffett, they were asked, "what's the single most important factor of your success". Gates and Buffett gave the same one-word answer: “Focus.”

Outsized outcomes require compounding which requires focus. 

The hard part? 

Knowing which compounding curve to choose.

I’ve previously written about how to decide what to do with your life. The short? Find what you’ve always been uniquely passionate about. Explore before you exploit. Experiment often but kill flops quickly. When you find the right thing, burn the boats.

You can do just about anything in life, but not everything.

Focus in day-to-day time allocation

Beyond life focus, it's essential to also focus each day. It's better to have one daily priority and ignore everything else. A trap is working on anything but the most important thing. You tell yourself you are working, but really this is a form of procrastination I call ‘fake work’.

Forcing yourself to do just one thing pushes you to find solutions because you can’t jump to something else. For example, if all you do for the day is ‘hiring’, you have no choice but to come up with actions to move the needle on that. You can no longer tap out when things get hard.

Focus minute-by-minute

But it’s still not enough to focus day-to-day. We must also focus minute-by-minute. That means avoiding multi-tasking and getting into deep work. I challenge you to download Rize to track your time. Most people who think they work 16-hour days tend to be closer to 9. Reality is confronting.

A life hack is having a ‘morning phone’. Before 9am, I only use my morning phone. All it has on it is an alarm, calendar, Spotify (for podcasts), Excel (for workout tracking), Open (for yoga), and Notion (for journalling).

Finally, to stay focused, I often think about several mantras:

• Limit works in progress. Resist the allure of middling priorities.
• Am I busy or am I productive? Am I doing fake work?
• Everywhere is nowhere. Everything is nothing.

Focus in team management

In a team, one person should do just one thing. It creates accountability. It ensures that standards are high. It forces people to close the loop on a single task before moving on.

Peter Thiel was famous for doing this atf PayPal. He required that everyone be tasked with exactly one priority and refused to discuss anything else with you except your #1 priority.

Focus in company strategy

Trying to build a company that does everything is a surefire way to fail. The best companies are constantly saying no to 100s of things.

Focus is why Steve Jobs famously cut Apple’s product line by 70% when he returned. Or why Frank Slootman, one of the best CEOs of all time, obsesses over ‘narrow the focus, increase quality’.

The way to improve is by first doing things better rather than doing more things.

Focus in company go-to-market

Successful customer acquisition follows a power-law distribution. Your best channel outperforms all of your other channels combined. It’s better to do one channel really well than ten channels in a haphazard fashion.

And this doesn’t just apply to company go-to-market strategy; rewards from doing something well follow a power law in all media industries:

Why does the power law apply to GTM?

• Resource constraints: It’s impossible to do everything, so it’s important to focus on the highest ROI things
• Expertise development: It’s easier to develop expertise by focusing on a few channels, tracking, analyzing, and iteratively adjusting
• Relationships & network effects: Network effects come from key relationships or brand virality in a single channel

The best consumer companies understand the power law of GTM. Whoop obsessively focused on athlete partnerships. Dollar Shave Club went viral with their humorous YouTube videos. Tesla relied on founder-led PR. Levels focused aggressively on content marketing through editorial and podcasts.

Focus in branding and positioning

The best brands are obsessively simple.

They select a few key values and let that inform all copywriting, imagery, strategic marketing, and messaging. It influencers where and how they show up in the world, what partnerships they make, what emotions they evoke, whom they choose to partner with. The consistency is key.

Focus is also essential for personal branding. I believe the strength of a personal brand is proportional to its simplicity, clarity, and consistency. You could, without hesitation, tell me the beliefs of Peter Thiel or Elon Musk or Barrack Obama. They understand the power of focus in branding, and as a result, build resonant, consistent brands.

Conclusion

You get the point. Focus matters. I think I get the point too, but one year from now I’m sure I’ll realize that I’m still underestimating the power of focus.

I’ll leave you with some parting words from Derek Sivers:

Think of the legendary achievers: the geniuses, brilliant artists, record-breaking athletes, or self-made billionaires. Do you think those people were well-balanced? Of course not. They focused all their energy only on one thing. That’s why they were great. Pursue your mission at the expense of everything else.

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